A Far Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

street, from the tangle of brush that led down into the valley. If it cracked, he shimmed it with chips from dry branches. He composed his own music or played traditional backlands folk songs and songs from the coast.
    On Friday evenings, he walked ten miles to Prince Leopold, where a group of old men formed the Remembering the Past Regional Band, with an accordion, tambourine, triangle and drum. Sometimes there was a man playing clarinet, with a register key fashioned from cut tin. They played long into the night. For the first few warm evenings, nearly the entire neighborhood gathered to watch them play. Over time, they went back to their radio sets and their rocking chairs, until only a few remained: Isabel and a simple man who laughed at his own secret joke; the wife of the triangle player; a pair of mangy dogs who stirred the dust and chewed at the flaking pads of their paws.
    Once, toward the end of winter, Isabel saw a little boy wandering on the dusty road above town. He was covered with long glass-like hair, and he chirped when she approached him. A week later, she fell sick. She shook with a fever, calling out, dreaming of people with strange faces taking her into the ground. Her mother made a poultice of leaves to press against her chest. Isaias came home in the evenings and lay next to her in her hammock. The fever broke.
    A week later, she saw the boy again. Again, she became ill, and dreamed of running on the surface of a river, leaping on rocks made of faces that bobbed and sank beneath her feet.
    Her mother took her to Prince Leopold, and then on a secondtruck to a small town farther out in the thorn scrub. There, they waited outside the house of a man who was said to move easily between worlds. There was a long line of trembling old men and women with screaming children. At last, they walked into a dark room, and her mother unfolded a crumpled wad of bills from a knot in her skirt.
    The man was heavy and unshaven. Isabel thought he would have incenses or cowrie shells to cast, but he sat alone on a chair with a missing back. On a table behind him were scattered cloves of garlic, a dead bird tied to a little wheel, brown bottles with rolled newspaper stoppers and a cut-metal pipe with punched eyes, pointed ears and thin wire arms. Bunches of herbs hung from nails hammered haphazardly about the room. A calendar read AUTOBODY PRINCE LEOPOLD . He called her ‘Isabel’ without asking for her name, and told her everything she had seen.
    To her mother, he said, ‘Her body isn’t closed.’ Her mother nodded. The man recited an invocation. It was a strong prayer and would protect her now. ‘But you will have to watch after her,’ he said, and prescribed a special prayer to Saint George.
    On the trip back her mother told her how there were certain people for whom there was less of a barrier between this world and the other one. Who needed prayers to close their bodies and protect them. These people could become healers or poets or could hear the word of God. They could see and smell and feel what others couldn’t. But they were vulnerable to everything: they were haunted by spirits that others couldn’t see, felt others’ sufferings, fell ill more easily and often. Prayers could close a body, although some people didn’t wish for their body to be closed: they risked the hauntings in exchange for their awareness. If a healer closed your body, youcould no longer know which plants cured and which were poison. Anyone’s body could be torn open, by too much sadness or too much suffering. It was why, with the death of someone close, the world seems different, the light changes, we can see and understand what we never saw before. ‘Once,’ said her mother, ‘when my sister died, I became sick, and saw a headless mule outside our house. In my dreams, a woman in white told me that our dogs would get distemper and the next year they did. They said I cried for two weeks, but I don’t remember crying at